


Now I'm Gonna Turn You

by gnimmish



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 15:19:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14571822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnimmish/pseuds/gnimmish
Summary: Peter and Gamora dance, around each other and then together, in more ways than one.





	Now I'm Gonna Turn You

**Author's Note:**

> This is the third fic in this collection, the first being The Gentlest, Briefest Touch and the second Nothing Better, though you don't necessarily need to have read them to enjoy this. The entire collection can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/ATKLTBC/).

“Dance with  me.”

The first time Peter says it, some time after her holding a knife to his throat and accusing him of pelvic sorcery, but before they encounter Ego, they are alone on the Milano’s flight deck, while everyone else sleeps, and Gamora has only just relaxed into the idea that this is becoming their routine.

She doesn’t sleep much – she’s been engineered to function without it – and Peter claims he can’t, so they are frequently the only two left awake after long days running jobs. (It isn’t until perhaps a year later that Gamora realises that Peter sleeps perfectly well, most of the time, and that, in the early days of their cohabitation, he was only staying up to keep her company).

Peter will put music on while he works on the ship, or plays a holo-game or drinks, and Gamora sharpens her blades, and together they share the space, largely in silence. Peter talks – especially when he’s drunk – but he doesn’t press her into conversations and she finds that his easy company is… pleasant. Perhaps even comforting. By far better than the night hours spent alone on Thanos’ ship, waiting to be pounced upon by Nebula, letting her mind wonder to the dark recesses of her childhood.

She likes Peter. She likes his music, which seems so full of joy, passion, sorrow – romance – all of which have been tantalisingly denied to her for so long. She still thinks, just occasionally, fleetingly, about listening to his Walkman on Knowhere, his fingers slipping into hers – how he almost kissed her, and she almost let him.

But she’s still wrong-footed when he says it.

“Dance with me.” He’s holding out his hand, the dim blue-pink of a distant nebula behind him through the Milano’s front screen, the ship’s low light casting him in delicate shades of gold. Gamora lets herself observe his unguarded smile, his tousled hair, his wrinkled shirt spotted with engine grease, his lack of a weapon; because it’s easier observe a mark, a target, a victim, than it is to be present in a moment where a kind and gentle man, whom she likes a great deal, is asking her to dance with him, and that she is free to say ‘yes’. 

“C’mon,” he beckons her, “what’s the worst that could happen?”

Gamora swallows. The song playing is something soft and slow and the Milano is warm and quiet the galaxy is still and safe and perhaps, just perhaps, she can be someone who has this.

“If you ever tell anyone about this,” she intones, as she approaches him, more confidently than she feels, “I will kill you.”

He grins. “Scout’s honour.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Means I promise,” he takes her hand, and gently pulls her closer – she forces herself not to stiffen. “Here, you just put your hand – there you go – and I’ll… yeah, see? Now we just… sway a little.”

He smells musty in a way that isn’t entirely pleasant – a combination of sweat and fuel and the freeze dried protein powder they all had for dinner because they’re running low on supplies and no one ever remembers to pick up proper food when they set down planet side. But the arm he puts around her waist is warm and already, somehow, familiar, and his shoulder beneath her arm is sturdy, and he holds her hand so gently – and it has been so long since anyone has ever touched her gently – that, suddenly, she doesn’t care how he smells. She only wants to linger here, like this.

“Now,” Peter tells her, seriously, “I’m gonna turn you.”

“How?” Gamora blinks, confused about what he’s suggesting.

“Well, I lift my arm like this, and you – turn,” he shrugs, “look, I’ll show you –“

And he lifts her arm and twists under it, clumsily because she’s too short for him and he has to duck beneath her wrist to complete the movement, which makes him stumble and she finds herself laughing – but she gets the theory. This is like a very slow kind of combat, with fewer blades – yet somehow no less risky.

“Why do you turn me?” She asks, practically, “why don’t I turn you?”

“Because you’re the girl.”

“That seems draconian.”

“Well, fine, I’ll turn you then you can turn me,” he waves a hand dismissively, “we can turn each other, but we gotta do the turn, okay, else it’s not dancing. My mom taught me, and she knew what she was doing.”

“Alright,” she shrugs, and he turns her, so that she unfurls outward away from him, and then he draws her back as gently as he released her, and she thinks that there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, though she can’t coin it because she’s too busy with the way Peter’s looking at her. It suddenly makes her feel hot and light.

It’s so easy for him, to be happy. And that’s so rare, and so precious, and she wonders, for the first time – a thin, fleeting but tantalising possibility – what it would be like to be happy with him.

“What?” he asks, at her expression, and she shakes the notion off as quickly as it had occurred.

“Nothing. Now I turn you, remember?”

So they dance. Not regularly. But when Peter asks, she never refuses.

And Peter grows slowly, gradually, bolder, especially after Ego. Perhaps because she has allowed herself to acknowledge the edge of whatever is between them and it has left them both on firmer ground, and perhaps because meeting his father and losing him – and Yondu – so rapidly has left Peter somewhat more appreciative of what he has. He has grown more attentive of Groot lately, too, and Gamora is certain that he’s now actually paying attention to all of Drax’s rambling anecdotes rather than daydreaming through them. And he asks her to dance more often, and holds her closer – and she enjoys it, more than she’d care to admit.

His body is becoming familiar in ways she wasn’t expecting. She already knows how the rhythm of his breath changes when he’s nervous, and that he shifts his weight onto his left foot a fraction of a second before he raises his blaster – she’s an assassin, she notes such things about everyone, as reflexively as she breathes. But now she also knows the sturdy set of his shoulders by the feel of them beneath her finger tips; knows the location of the callous on his trigger finger because she has felt it whilst she holds his hand. She knows the regular temperature of the surface of his skin because of the way his palms sometimes find a gap between her top and the waistband of her pants. She knows how often he shaves, and when he’s rushed it, because of the spray of razer burn that sometimes turns up under his chin.

She knows the way he looks at her when they’re alone – only when they’re alone – and how it turns something in her chest. She’s starting to feel that they have a language for themselves now. A place of safety that exists just between them.

Perhaps they are both growing bolder.

She kisses him first because somehow she doesn’t want Peter to do it. She can feel the moment coming, knows with the same certainty that she knows that Drax will get into fist fights and Rocket will steal engine parts and Mantis will ask for candy, that she and Peter will find their way into each other. They are taking part in a particular kind of dance and it’s drawing them both toward only one end.

So she pre-empts fate, and does it herself. Perhaps because wants to reassure herself that she isn’t simply being swept along by the whiles of a notorious womanizer – that she is choosing this, him, that she can choose some small happiness for herself. Perhaps because in that moment when he tells her that she’s ‘just right’, kissing him seems like the only possible appropriate reaction.  

“Dance with me,” she says to him, some months later, when kissing him has become something she does so regularly that it feels almost normal.

“Okay,” he’s on his feet immediately – they are alone in the Quadrant’s mess hall and Gamora has found a song she likes on the zune; something about _what the world needs now_ , apparently mostly being love. Which, she thinks, is a pleasant idea, if not an entirely practical one.

It’s late in the Quadrant’s night cycle, and Gamora cannot sleep. Though she needs little of it, even the customary few hours she does require are escaping her.

 Earlier, planetside, while they had put down to pick up supplies, she had picked up a child’s dropped doll to hand it back, and the child’s parent had taken one look at her and yanked the child away like she was offering up a loaded weapon.

And Gamora still feels the humiliating sting of it – worse, the look on Peter’s face – the way he’d flushed angrily and she had grabbed his arm to stop him saying something. What good could he have done?

People have been reacting to Gamora like that for a long time. Anyone who’s ever had cause to know about the daughters of Thanos would have cause to recognise her, and no one who’s ever had cause to know about the daughters of Thanos has come by the knowledge happily.

Being recognised in public has long been a dangerous proposition for her, even in the wake of the Guardians’ rise to notoriety. Perhaps even more so now. There are those that resent her being lauded as a hero, when she has never received punishment for her crimes. But she hasn’t been confronted with such overt fear of her presence in a long time. She has been lulled into forgetting what she is to most of the galaxy’s local population – not a hero, not even a criminal, but a monster.

“Dance with me,” she asks, because, just for a little while, she would like to be held.

Peter sweeps her up so that her toes actually leave the ground and she laughs, until he kisses her, soft and lingering, until her head is swimming some. She likes the kissing, she really does, but sometimes she feels the gravitational tug of just how deeply Peter’s feelings for her run and she has to stop herself recoiling. She is not someone who is beloved – she never has been – especially not one beloved by good people, happy people, people who smile and dance as if nothing in the galaxy could come more easily to them. And she has to fight the sensation that he will see that about her, somehow – that he will find it out and flee like any sensible being should in the face of her monstrosity.

 “What?” Peter has set her down with a quizzical look at her expression.

“I meant that I actually do want to dance,” she points out.

“Oh. Not make out?”

“I mean – later.”

He grins at her, “cool.”

They dance in slow circles, Peter’s hand in the small of her back, guiding rather than steering, his gaze attentively on her face, and Gamora lays her cheek on his chest and exhales, closing her eyes. Not for the first time, she wishes she could step into him and melt from her own existence for a while – safe in the circle of him, never having to experience herself except for how he sees her, how tender and careful he is with her, as if she’s truly worthy of being cared for.

“You okay?” He asks, over her head, with that softness in his voice he reserves only for moments when he can sense her vulnerability.

“Yes,” she hesitates only a moment before she tucks her fingers under his shirt at the back, feeling him tense and then exhale at the contact. “I am now.”

“Okay,” he kisses the top of her head, his grip tightening on her. Normally, she doesn’t like to be restrained at all, but the pressure on her body feels like a relief. “I really wish I’d punched that guy today.”

Gamora manages a humourless snort of laughter. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

“You’re way nicer than you need to be, you know that?”

“Peter, I probably murdered someone he loved,” Gamora looks up at him, “you do understand that, don’t you?”

“You don’t know that,” Peter frowns, “maybe he’s just – racist against green people. You don’t know.”

“I think I do, though.”

Peter sighs. “You get that I’m never not going to want to punch someone who treats you like shit, right? I don’t care why they do it.”

“Even if their reasons involve genocide?”

“Babe, you have never been personally responsible for a genocide. I’ve seen you. You’re super dangerous but you’re kinda small,” he gives her ribs a poke to illustrate his point, “I mean, I can see you carrying off a bunch of assassinations, but genocide seems above your pay grade. Maybe if you had like a bunch of extra arms – ”

“Peter!” Gamora tries to contain her amusement in the face of his grim sense of humour, “we don’t joke about genocide!”

“Right, yes, sorry.”

“I escaped one, you know.”

“Yeah, yup, inappropriate jokes not welcome, duly noted.”

She rolls her eyes, tucking her cheek back to his chest to hide her smile. Sometimes the lengths he will go to to try to cheer her up seem truly bizarre.

They have stopped dancing.

Her hands are still on the bare skin of his back – she traces a finger around the knot of scar tissue she knows he got after what he called a ‘misunderstanding’ with a Xandaran led to him being ‘lightly stabbed’. He’s gone very still, and it takes a moment for her to realise that it’s because she’s touching him like that.

“You know,” he clears his throat  hastily, “if you wanted a hug, you only had to ask. I mean, that’s one of the benefits of – us. We can hug, any time you want.”

“I wanted to dance.”

“Yeah. I know.” He’s rubbing her back through her top in wide, smooth circles. “Still, if you ever want – anything else – you can just say the word. You know that, right?”

She can sense in his words the undercurrent of what he’s asking her.

“You mean sex?”

“Uh,” the flush spreads from his ears to his cheeks, “I mean, yeah.”

“Yes, I know that,” she glances down, “that I would only have to say that I wanted – ”

“But you absolutely don’t have to,” he hastens, “I mean, seriously, babe, what we’ve got right now is fine, it’s awesome, we never have to do anything else, you don’t have to feel like – ”

“Do you think I don’t want to have sex with you?” Gamora squints at him and Peter’s mouth drops open.

“I – no, that’s not what I – I mean – you do?” He looks so confused she’s tempted to laugh, but he’s being so earnest it would feel cruel.

“Yes.” There doesn’t seem any sense in denying the truth. She’s thought about it often enough. “I’m just… picking the moment.”

“Okay, so, if you need a suggestion in regards to moments, I have, like, a bunch,” Peter tells her, quickly, “like so many moments to choose from.”

His immediate, boyish enthusiasm makes her smile; the flush in his cheeks has deepened and he has a bright, giddy look in his eyes – had he really been under the impression that she wouldn’t want him, sexually?

It’s just that their lives are, to say the least, chaotic, and it seems that whenever they get moments alone they are exhausted, or hungry, or covered in monster guts; or else they simply aren’t alone for a satisfactory amount of time.

And yes, in truth, she is apprehensive. Peter’s reputation as a lover is prodigious, whilst her experience is sparse – what experimentation had been possible before she left Thanos was necessarily brief and mostly unsatisfying. A childish, petty part of her is afraid that he will find her… lacking. And a larger, darker element within her very soul is convinced that the moment she has him, she will lose him – because isn’t that how her life has always worked?

So she has been hesitant to venture further into what she and Peter have. It feels safer and easier to teeter on the brink of a truly sexual relationship than it is to explore it fully – though she can recognise that that’s cowardly, and that she is depriving herself of something she wants out of fear, which is not normally within her character.

But, she has to admit, here in the quiet cavern of the Quadrant, with music playing and the lights low and Peter holding her close and looking at her with such unhesitant warmth, her doubts are rapidly dwindling.

She kisses him, quickly and softly, and he lifts her chin and kisses her back, and she slides her hands further up, under his shirt, feeling the skin heat beneath her fingertips, and hears him make a soft, encouraging noise in the back of his throat.

So she presses herself against him, pushing, and he lets himself be pushed – she walks him back until his back hits a table, and she hasn’t drawn breath since she started to kiss him and her face is suddenly on fire. She gasps, and Peter has pulled himself up to sit on the edge of the table and then he’s tugging her insistently after him, and in the bewildering rush of sensation it’s momentarily difficult to understand what he wants – she realises, belatedly, and scrambles up to straddle his lap and – yes, this is a good angle. She’s looking down into his face, his eyes wide and bright and his expression so open, so happy, so warm, she wants to eat him up, immediately.

Gamora lays her hands either side of Peter’s face, and kisses his nose, his brow, his cheekbones, his eyelids, grazes her teeth along the stubble of his jaw –

Peter groans, sounding like nothing she has ever heard before, and tangles a hand in her hair, tugging just enough to get her to lift her chin, and then he’s kissing her neck, open mouthed and hungry and it feels good and new and exciting in ways she absolutely couldn’t have predicted.

They are wrestling his shirt off over his head at the exact moment that an explosion rattles the ship and throws them both off the table.

“Ow!” Peter takes her elbow to his stomach as they land in a flailing tumble, “you have got to be kidding me!”

“Sorry!” Gamora sits up, breathless and disorientated, her body still humming with adrenalin.

“Not you,” Peter is rubbing his belly where she hit him, “this – this is typical – ”

“Hey, gross love birds!” Rocket is standing in the entrance of the mess hall, in his pyjamas, “finish whatever unsanitary thing you’re doing where we eat real quick, cause I got this feeling like we’re all about to die!”

“Yup, thanks Rocket,” Peter sits up, and Gamora can’t help a wry grin.

“I did tell you I was picking my moment.”

“Yeah – we’re gonna have to pick another one,” Peter sighs, ruefully, “rain check?”

“I don’t know what the means,” she frames his good, sweet face with her hands again, because she’s still on top of him and she’s going to take advantage of that while she can.

“It means we are absolutely continuing this,” Peter grasps her wrists, and brushes his mouth to one of her knuckles, “just, you know, as long as we don’t die.”


End file.
